1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to the functions of email programs/services associated with facilitating user viewing and processing of their emails.
2. Background Information
With advances in integrated circuit, microprocessor, networking and communication technologies, increasing number of devices, in particular, digital computing devices, are being interconnected together. The increased interconnectivity of computing devices have led to wide spread adoption of applications “connecting” a large number of users/organizations together, such as the world wide web and email.
To many users, email, whether it is provided through a program (such as Lotus Notes, available from IBM of Armonk, N.Y.) or a service (such as Hotmail, available from Microsoft Network of Redmond, Wash.), has become a fundamental medium of communication just like telephone. Even for the moderate reliant users, it is not unusual to have hundreds if not thousands of emails accumulated in their “inboxes”, “sent folders” or other subject specific “folders”. [As those skilled in the art would appreciate, “inboxes”, “folders” in general and “sent folders” in particular are typically logical views of the email records being held, i.e. undeleted.]
Prior art email programs/services typically offer only standard sorting functions 116a–116b that sort email listings within a folder (e.g. sent folder 106) in either ascending or descending order in accordance with the content of one of the listing fields, such as “To” field 108 (also referred to as “addressee” field) or “Date Sent” field 112, as illustrated in FIGS. 1a–1b. If the sort field is the “addressee” field, the sorting and therefore, the resulted listing 114 is based on the primary addressee (i.e. the first enumerated addressee in accordance with the spatial order of enumeration), as illustrated in FIG. 1b. Other addressees, referred to as secondary addressee, i.e. subsequent (or non first) enumerated addressees (in accordance with the spatial order of enumeration), or implied addressees (as in the case of group addressees) are not taken into consideration. A group addressee is an addressee that implicitly addresses multiple recipients (often referred to as member addressees of the group addressees) at the same time, such as example addressee “dept99” shown in FIG. 1a. For the example group address “dept99”, it implicitly addresses all members of Department 99 at the same time. Typically, group addressees are set up by “users” having the requisite “administration” authority, such as an email system's administrator.
Thus, for a user with a relatively large number of accumulated emails (in a “folder”), it is rather difficult under the prior art to find all the emails addressed to an addressee of interest (within the “folder”), as the addressee of interest is not always addressed as the primary addressee. The addressee of interest may be addressed as a secondary addressee or indirectly via a group addressee.
While some email programs/services offer a “find” or “advanced find” function to allow a user to find emails based on certain contents in certain fields, many users consider these “find” or “advanced find” functions difficult to use. Moreover, it can only locate the other email listings where an addressee of interest is addressed as a primary or secondary addressee. These “find” or “advanced find” functions are unable to identify for a user, emails addressed to certain group addressees where the addressee of interest is a member of these group addressees.
Thus, a more user friendly approach to allowing a user to locate emails addressed to an addressee of interest, independent of the addressing position and/or the addressing manner, is desired.